Introduction

With the development of information communication
technologies, a number of alternative strategies to the traditional
scholarly publishing system have been evolved. Among these, Open Access
(OA) model which promise to be extremely advantageous to peers
everywhere, especially to those who have acute shortage of resources
for purchasing scholarly literature. The impetus of OA was boosted by
the Open Society Institute (OSI) in a small meeting convened in
Budapest on December 1-2, 2001. The purpose of the meeting was to
accelerate progress in the international effort to make research
literature in all academic fields freely available on the Internet
(OAIS, 2002; Hirtle, 2001). The first major international statement on
OA, which includes a definition, background information and a list of
signatories, is the Budapest Open Access Initiative. The other two
leading statements are the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing
and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences
and Humanities. The conception of open access in these three
statements, which is often called the BBB (Budapest, Bethesda and
Berlin) definition, launched, inspired, and continues to guide the open
access movement.

Although institutional-based, or more typically
departmental, 'archives' were known before this, especially in areas
such as computer science and economics that were served by NCSTRL and
RePEc, respectively, OAI introduced the Protocol for Metadata
Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to provide common services that could operate over
more general, independent sites (Lynch 2001). Institutional Repository
(IR) adopt the same open access and interoperable framework as e-print
archive, but rather than being discipline-based, represent the wide
range of research output of a given university or research
organization. The term was coined by Scholarly Publishing for Academic
Resources Coalition (SPARC), and has been defined by SPARC as “digital
collections capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a
single or multi-university community” (Crow, 2001). Crow argues that
institutional digital repositories will lead to significant increases
in the prestige of the institutions that build them (Crow, 2002).
Stephen Harnad also cites institutional prestige: “Distributed,
institution-based self-archiving benefits research institutions in
three ways. First, it maximizes the visibility and impact of its own
refereed research output. Second, by symmetry, it maximizes their
researchers’ access to the full refereed research output of all other
institutions. Third, institutions themselves can hasten the transition
to self-archiving and so more quickly reduce their library’s annual
serials expenditures to 10% (paid to journal publishers for refereeing
their submissions)”(Harnad, 2002). Pinfield, Gardner, and MacColl also
argue that an e-print archive can raise the profile of an institution
(Pinfield, Gardner, & MacColl, 2001).

Defining Institutional Repositories

An IR may be defined as an on-line locus for collecting
and preserving – in digital form- the intellectual output of an
institution, particularly a research institution (wikipedia). According
to Lynch (2003) an institutional repository is a “set of services that
a university offers to the members of its community for the management
and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and
its community members. It is most essentially an organizational
commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including
long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and
access or distribution."

For a university this include materials such as research
journal articles before (preprint) and after (post prints) undergoing
peer review, and digital versions of theses and dissertations, but it
might also include other digital assets generated by normal academic
life, such as administrative documents, course notes or learning
object. An IR is a collection of digital research documents such as
articles, book chapters, conference papers and data sets. E-prints are
the digital texts of peer-reviewed research articles, before and after
refereeing. Before refereeing and publication, the draft is called a
"preprint". The refereed, accepted, final draft is called a
"postprint". The term e-prints include both preprints and postprints.

With the increasing use of ICTs and availability of open
sources software packages most of the institutions are maintaining such
repository or archive to collect, preserve, and make accessible the
entire intellectual product created by the scholarly communities of
that institutions. Main objectives for having an IR are:

to create global visibility for an institution’s
scholarly research;

to collect content in a single location;

to provide access to institutional research output by
self-archiving it;

to store and preserve other institutional digital
assets, including unpublished or otherwise easily lost (“grey”)
literature (e.g., theses or technical reports).

IRs are now become an important new player in the field
of academic information management and publishing. The development and
growth of IRs arose in response to the major changes in scholarly
communication. The new form of scholarship - that is born digital -
constitutes an important source for present and future research and
teaching. With the emergence of the World Wide Web as an effective
vehicle for publishing and distributing, the born-digital form of
scholarly objects becomes more popular. Additionally, the rapid rise in
the cost of commercial scholarly journals was another major impetus in
developing new models in scholarly publishing. IRs benefit scholars by
providing free access to all scholarly works which are published or
likely to be published in near future. It reduces the gap of ‘backlog’
by bringing timely access, and increases visibility through freely
accessible Web.

Growth in the number of IRs has accelerated since 2002.
Despite some lag in time, there has been corresponding growth in terms
of number of digital content in IRs, as revealed by the Registry of
Open Access Repositories (ROAR, http://roar.eprints.org/). Among
repository directories, "on December 31, 2006, OAIster (launched in
2002) listed 726 OA, OAI-compliant repositories worldwide; with an
increase of 25% than previous year. In 2006 OAIster listed a total of
6,255,599 records from the repositories it covered (Suber 2007). ROAR
is one of the authentic sources that identify repositories worldwide.
With the increasing popularity of open access materials from
world-wide, number of IRs are increasing continuously. At the end of
November 2010, there were more than 1800 IRs world-wide as listed in
the OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories). Out of the total
IRs, more than 50% are in USA, UK, Germany and Spain. (OpenDoar,
www.opendoar.org)There has also been extensive investigation of the
role of various types of repositories in the scholarly communications
process, particularly in the context of e-prints and author
self-archiving, and even, more recently, with respect to institutional
archives policies about author self-archiving; however, these studies
really don't illuminate the full range of developments surrounding IRs
planning and deployment (Lynch & Lippincott, 2005). To the best
of our knowledge, there has been relatively little systematic
examination of the actual state of deployment of IRs in Asia. It is,
therefore, important that a study be undertaken with the sole purpose
of identifying the present status of IRs in the countries of Asia.

Objectives of the Study

The major objectives of the present paper are:

To identify the overall growth of IRs in the countries
of Asia;

To examine the country-wise distribution of IRs and
number of objects;

To identify the leading countries in terms of number
of IRs and objects;

To measure the quantity of objects under various forms;

To determine the prominent subject, software, language
of IRs; and

To identify the policy statements of IRs

Method

Since the study was planned to analyse the growth and
present status of IRs, survey method was found suitable. Our
investigation began with the one of the most authoritative online
directories: Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR). Additionally,
we also looked Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR, www.opendoar.org)
and OAIster to identify other IRs which are not covered by ROAR. The
access policy for all the directories was checked to know whether all
the materials of the aforesaid directories were available free, or
partially free. The factual data in terms of number, country of origin,
document types, subjects, software used, language, host domain and
policy of individual IRs were noted for further analyses.

Results

Growth of IRs

First, we were tried to find out the growth in number of
IRs over the years. This data is based on date of registration in the
aforesaid directory. Since the directory was created in 2006 the
previous data of growth was not available.

Table 1: Growth of IRs: 2006-15th December, 2010

Year

No. of IRs

Yearly addition of IRs

2006

40

2007

96

56

2008

142

54

2009

183

41

2010 (up to 15th December,
2010)

296

113

So table 1 shows the growth of IRs during last five
years. As on 2006 there were 40 IRs existed which rose to 96 in 2007,
142 in 2008 and 183 in 2009 with an addition of 56, 54 and 41 IRs
between 2006-2007, 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 respectively. At the time of
writing this paper, this number touched 296 with an addition of 113 IRs
between 2009- 15th December 2010. So, more phenomenal growth is
expected up to the end of the year 2010.

Country-wise distribution of IRs and records

In the next step attempts were made to identify number
of IRs and objects hold by repositories in each country. As mentioned
in table 2, highest number of IRs are now in the Japan (129) followed
by Taiwan (50) and India (42). A total of 296 repositories were
identified in Asia region which are distributed among 25 countries.
Here we have listed and presented the status of only top 10 countries
having more than 3 or more IRs individually. Among the remaining 15
countries, Bangladesh, Iran, Israel, Kirgizstan, Pakistan, Philippines
and Singapore have two IRs each; whereas Afghanistan, Azerbaijan,
Georgia, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Qatar, Sri Lanka and Vietnam have one IR
each.

Table 2: Status of IRs in Asian countries-December 2010

Countries

Number of Archives

% (IR)

Number of Objects

% (Objects)

Average Number of Objects per IR

Japan

129

43.58

414960

29.32

3217

Taiwan

50

16.89

515185

36.40

10304

India

42

14.18

75234

5.31

1791

Malaysia

11

3.71

37115

2.62

3774

Turkey

11

3.71

23322

1.02

2120

China

10

3.37

69797

1.64

6980

Indonesia

7

2.36

37833

2.67

5405

Thailand

6

2.02

9305

2.08

1552

Korea, Republic of

5

1.68

68526

0.65

13705

Saudi Arabia

3

1.01

119145

8.42

39715

Other

22

7.43

44538

3.14

2025

Total

296

1414960

4780

As we look in the details of the size of IRs, we also
witness strong differences per country and within countries in terms of
number of objects from a few to hundreds of thousands of records per
repository. Overall, there are as much as 1414960 records available in
all these IRs with an average of 4780 records per IR. The number of IRs
per country differ widely both in numbers of IRs and in average number
of documents. As table 2 shows, Japan is the leader in terms of total
number of IRs but dropped to 2nd position in
terms of total number of records and 7th
position in average number of records. Similarly India secured 3rd
position in terms of number IRs but its position in number of records
per IR is 9th. On the other hand, it is
important to note that Republic of Korea and Saudi Arabia get 9th
and 10th position in terms of number of IRs but
the average number of records per IR is the highest in all ten
countries listed in the table as 2nd and 1st
position respectively. Rest of the countries in the continent has 22
IRs with 3.14 % of the total number of records and 8th
position in terms of average number of records.

Types of objects

Table 3 shows the types of objects currently stored in
IRs. It may be observed from the Table 3 that although various
categories of objects are archived in IRs, the main focus of the
holdings is on journal articles (37%) followed by conference and
workshop papers (19%), unpublished reports and working papers (13%) and
books or chapters/section of books (11%). These unpublished records
includes electronic theses and dissertations, digitized special
collections materials, course materials etc.

Table 3: Type of objects

Types of content

Number of Objects

% (Objects)

Number of IR

% (IR)

Articles

523535

37.00

240

81.08

Theses

268842

19.00

139

46.95

Unpublished\working papers

183944

13.00

109

36.82

Conference/workshop papers

155645

11.00

96

32.43

Books, chapters and sections

99047

7.00

67

22.63

Learning/course material

42448

3.00

54

18.24

Multimedia/audio-visual materials

28299

2.00

48

16.21

Bibliographic references

12315

0.87

38

12.83

Datasets

6676

0.47

5

1.69

Patents

5238

0.37

10

3.38

Software

2074

0.15

2

0.67

Other special objects

16149

1.14

47

15.88

Total

1414960

855*

*Number of Institutional Repositories exceeds
with the actual number (296) due to most archives hold several types of
objects

The country-wise coverage of IRs related to type of
objects (number of repositories devoted to each type of objects) is
shown in table 4. What comes across clearly from the table is that, in
the countries listed, the main focus of the holdings of current IRs is
on journal articles. However, within this type of material we witness
strong differences per country e.g. in Malaysia most of the IRs (10
IRs) are currently devoted to hold conference and workshop papers,
while in Japan it observed that most of the IRs (117) are for journal
articles. It is also worth noting that in China almost all the
repositories are for ‘patent’ category of records, whereas, other
countries (except Taiwan and Saudi Arabia) have no IR for this category
of records.

Table 4: Country-wise coverage of IRs related to type of
objects (Number of IRs devoted to each type of objects)

Types of Objects

Japan

Taiwan

India

Malaysia

Turkey

China

Indonesia

Thailand

Korea

S. Arabia

Article

117

36

33

9

7

9

7

4

4

2

Theses

53

25

21

7

7

7

5

4

1

1

Unpublished/working paper

63

11

14

3

3

3

1

2

1

Conference/Workshop paper

27

14

21

10

4

5

3

3

2

1

Books/chapters

28

9

9

5

4

2

1

4

1

Learning/course material

19

8

11

3

1

2

2

1

2

Multimedia/audio visual objects

18

5

7

4

3

2

2

1

1

1

Bibliographic References

6

20

2

1

1

1

1

1

Patents

1

10

1

Datasets

5

Software

2

Other special objects

21

5

7

4

1

2

Subject Coverage of IRs

In the next step we tried to identify the disciplinary
coverage of the IRs. The subject coverage of the IRs is quite
interesting. We identified 26 broad subject categories. The same is
shown in Table 5. Most large institutions effectively hold all subjects
in their repositories. They are, therefore, categorised as
‘multidisciplinary’. On the other hand, specialist institutions and
disciplinary repositories only cover a few subjects, and these have
been indexed individually. As indicated in table 5, the most prominent
unique subject under which most of the records archived was ‘health and
medicine’ (5.47% of the total), followed by ‘technology’ (4.22% of the
total). Although, the number of IRs under heading ‘multidisciplinary’
is quite high, the result does not represent any conclusion. Because
the subject ‘multidisciplinary’ is the combination of number of
subjects, and to calculate the proportion of unique subject to the
total was a complex task. It is interesting to note that the number of
IRs in the field of arts, social science like ‘history and archaeology’
(8 IRs), ‘social science general’ (4 IRs), ‘law and politics’ (5 IRs)
etc. were quite low. Whereas, number of IRs in science, medicine and
technology disciplines are quite high than social science disciplines.
This is the clear indication that movement of open access to scholarly
literature is started with the scientific disciplines and slowly the
scholars of others fields are taking interest.

Table 5: Disciplinary coverage of IRs

Subjects

Number of IRs

%

Multidisciplinary

225

55.97

Health and Medicine

22

5.47

Technology General

17

4.22

Science General

17

4.22

Agriculture, Food and Veterinary

11

2.73

Biology and Biochemistry

11

2.73

Education

10

2.48

Mathematics and Statistics

8

1.99

History and archeology

8

1.99

Chemistry and Chemical Technology

7

1.74

Library and information Science

7

1.74

Physics and Astronomy

6

1.49

Business and Economics

6

1.49

Ecology and Environment

5

1.24

Law and Politics

5

1.24

Management and Planning

5

1.24

Language and Literature

5

1.24

Arts and Humanities General

5

1.24

Philosophy and Religion

4

1.00

Social sciences General

4

1.00

Earth and Planetary Science

3

0.74

Computer and IT

3

0.74

Mathematical Engineering

3

0.74

Fine and Performing Arts

2

0.49

Architecture

1

0.24

Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1

0.24

Geography and Regional Studies

1

0.24

Total

402

Note: Number of IRs put in more than one
subject category, as a result total number exceeds to the real number
(296) as mentioned in table 5.

Software Used

As mentioned in table 6, DSpace is widely used (200 IRs)
software package. This was followed by E-prints (34 IRs), XooNTps (10
IRs) and HiTOS (6 IRs). A large number of IRs (41) did not mention the
name of software they used for their archives. Besides the list of
software packages shown in table 6, there are a few institutions with
locally developed systems or content management systems that are used
to set up an IR.

Table 6: Software packages used for IRs

Name of Software

Number of IRs

%

D-Space

200

67.56

E-Prints

34

11.48

XooNTps

10

3.38

HiTOS

6

2.02

Greenstone

4

1.35

Nitya

1

0.33

Unknown

41

13.85

Total

296

In examining the software packages used to support IRs,
we found considerable variation in the level of software diversity from
one nation to the next; looking across nations, only a few packages saw
use in many different countries, most notably the DSpace software,
which is used in all the countries listed, and EPrints which is used in
6 of the 10 countries listed for the study. Besides the list of
software packages shown in table 7 there are many institutions with
locally developed systems or content management systems that are used
to set up an IR. It is worth noting that in Turkey the HiTOS software
has a large base, with 6 sites out of the total 10 IRs and in Japan the
XooNTps package was used in 10 institutions.

Table 7: Software packages used for IRs in different
countries

Countries

DSpace

EPrints

XooNTps

HiTOS

Greenstone

Nitya

Unknown

Japan

91

5

10

1

Taiwan

46

4

India

27

12

1

2

Malaysia

3

6

1

1

Turkey

1

3

6

1

China

9

1

Indonesia

1

4

2

Thailand

6

Korea, R

3

2

Saudi Arabia

1

1

1

Other

Total

200

34

10

64

1

41

IRs by Language

The study then identified the language of the interface
of the IRs. It is observed from the table 8 that the interface of IRs
has been built in various languages to support the users of their
respective language. However, English becomes the most prominent
language of interface among all. Of the total 296 IRs, 229 IRs were in
English language, suggest such proposition. English is followed by
Japanese, Chinese and Turkish with 128, 64 and 10 IRs respectively.

Table 8: IRs by language

Languages

Number of IRs

English

229

Japanese

128

Chinese

64

Turkish

10

Thai

6

Arabic

5

Hindi

5

Korean

5

Russian

4

Persian

3

German

2

Indonesian

2

Kannada

2

Malay

2

Malayalam

2

Other

10

Total

479*

Note: Total number exceeds with the actual
number (296) due to interface of some IRs in more than one language.

IRs according to Host Domain

This study also distinguished IRs on the basis of their
nature of host organization. All IRs grouped into the four categories:
Aggregating i.e. an archive aggregating data from several subsidiary
repositories; Disciplinary i.e. across institutional subject
repository; Governmental i.e. a repository for governmental data; and
University-based Institutional i.e. an institutional or departmental
archive. It was observed that maximum number of IRs (276) were
university based institutional, followed by disciplinary (12) and
aggregating (6).

Table: 9 Types of IRs

Types of IRs

Number of IRs

%

University-based Institutional

276

93.24

Disciplinary

12

4.05

Aggregating

6

2.02

Governmental

2

0.68

Total

296

There is no significant difference in the types of IRs
in different countries as shown in table 10. Most of organizations of
IRs are institutional in all nations of Asia.

Table 10: Country wise distribution of IRs by types of
Host Domain

Countries

Institutional

Disciplinary

Aggregate

Governmental

Japan

126

3

Taiwan

49

1

India

30

3

1

Malaysia

11

Turkey

11

China

9

1

Indonesia

7

Thailand

5

1

Korea, Republic of

3

2

Saudi Arabia

2

1

Other

23

5

2

Total

276

12

6

2

IRs Policies

An IR is driven and directed by its policies which
determine its identity, quality and direction. It is not sufficient to
create a repository merely by putting software on a machine. An
archive's organisational model is the sum of its policies and an
archive without policies is like as library without a librarian (Robbio
& Coll, 2005). The principal policy concerns of IR, which are
important to know, are its:

Content policies: type of material to be submitted

Submission policies: who would authorize to submit
material in the IR

Preservation policies: maintaining records for future
use

We tried to find out above mentioned policies for every
IR in terms of content policy, submission policy and preservation
policy. The following parameters were identified to know the status of
IRs policies:

If we were able to find policy information, the
status is set to ‘Defined’.

In some cases, there may be a slot for the relevant
policy, but all it says is 'not yet defined'. In these cases we set the
status to 'Undefined'.

If there is information on policies, but the
particular policy is not covered, the status is set to 'Unstated'.

If we were unable to find any policy information at
all, the status is set to 'Unknown'.

Content Policy

It may be observed from table 11A that 91.89% of IRs
does not have a well defined policy for the types of records to be
deposited in these IRs. Only 2.72% of IRs has defined policy regarding
types of material to be submitted, whereas around 3.04% found unstated.
Similar condition was found in all the countries.

Table 11A: Policy for type of objects

Countries

Defined

Undefined

Unstated

Japan

2

124

3

Taiwan

1

49

India

3

34

5

Malaysia

3

8

Turkey

11

China

3

7

Indonesia

7

Thailand

6

Korea, Republic of

5

Saudi Arabia

3

Other

2

21

1

Total

11

275

9

Submission Policy

Similarly, it is important for an IR to make it clear
that who will authorize to submit material to an IR and what are the
term and conditions of submission of an item. Again it can be seen from
the table 11B that around 90% of IRs does not have a defined policy for
the submission of documents. Only 7% of IRs has defined policy for the
same. It is unstated for 3% and unknowns for 1%.

Table 11B: Records submission policy

Countries

Defined

Undefined

Unstated

Unknown

Japan

5

120

2

2

Taiwan

1

49

India

6

30

6

Malaysia

2

9

Turkey

11

China

3

7

Indonesia

7

Thailand

6

Korea, Republic of

5

Saudi Arabia

3

Other

3

18

Total

20

265

8

2

Preservation Policy

As table 11C shows, only 2.36% of IRs have a defined
policy for the preservation of documents, whereas 83% of IRs do not
make a clear policy for the preservation of documents. 14.19% of IRs
does not give any information regarding preservation policy and the
status is unstated.

Table 11C: Preservation policy

Countries

Defined

Undefined

Unstated

Unknown

Japan

109

19

1

Taiwan

1

49

India

1

22

19

Malaysia

1

10

Turkey

11

China

1

8

1

Indonesia

7

Thailand

6

Korea, Republic of

4

1

Saudi Arabia

3

Other

3

16

3

Total

7

245

42

2

It may be observed from the above results that there are
not more than 10% IRs that have made clear policies for type of
content, submission and preservation. But we can say it is good start
and in near future this gap would be reduced.

Discussion

Comparing the size of IRs between institutions of
various countries in Asia is clearly a very complex problem, probably
intractable in the short term, it would be relatively easy to collect
estimated rate of repositories growth, and this would be helpful in
understanding the landscape. From the growth of IRs since last five
year, one may visualize the professionals’ growing eagerness towards
making their scholarly research openly accessible. Only in few years
span, the volume of literature has already increased manifold and this
explosion still continues. So it is a great challenge to an e-publisher
to archive these huge electronic data for future. At the same time,
based on the number of institutional repositories established over the
past few years, the IR service appears to be quite attractive and
compelling to institutions. IRs provide an institution with a mechanism
to showcase its scholarly output, centralize and introduce efficiencies
to the stewardship of digital documents of value, and respond
proactively to the escalating crisis in scholarly communication
(Gibbons, 2004).

The phrase "if you build it, they will come" does not
yet apply to developing countries in context of establishing IRs. While
their benefits seem to be very persuasive to developing countries, most
of IRs are still in developed countries. An overwhelming number of
items from developed countries may need to put critical insight into
the ways in which various nations are thinking about the role of
institutional repositories. In fact, the problem, ‘resource-crunch’ is
more acute in developing countries than developed countries. However,
the efforts from developed countries are appreciable than other
countries.

When we analysed these IRs according to types of
materials it includes, the result of our findings suggest that
currently the institutional repositories mostly house traditional
(print-oriented) scholarly publications and grey literature: journal
and conference articles, books, theses and dissertations, and research
reports. From this we can at least speculate that open access issues in
scholarly publishing may well be the key drivers of institutional
repositories deployment, at least in the very short term, rather than
the new demands of scholarly communications related to e-science and
e-research. On analyzing the distribution of subjects in these
repositories, it may be concluded that the institutes in the fields
like health and medicine, chemistry and chemical technology, biology
and biochemistry etc. are more interested to disseminate their findings
to the wider audience. Due to that, a large number of materials were
opening accessible to the IRs. It is quite evident that the field
‘science’ is changing very fast than other discipline and obsolesce of
concepts are more prevalent in science discipline. Additionally, the
traditional journal system is heavily affected by the problem of
back-log. So, submitting materials to IRs before actual publication
helps author to disseminate their findings at faster rate. The
relatively low-quantity of IRs and documents in the field of social
sciences & humanities may be an indication that awareness about
submission of scholarly text in open access archives amongst
humanities/social science academics is not enough, or, they do not find
it worthwhile to submit their scholarly text in IRs. However, they
perceive many advantages to depositing their work in institutional
repositories, especially for the reader, not for themselves.

The use of DSpace as one of the leading software in
these IRs may be due to the fact that DSpace code already supports
self-publishing and self-archiving features. One can rely heavily on
DSpace for preservation, metadata, persistent URLs etc (DSpace, 2007).
Similarly, most of these materials were of English language, is a clear
indication that English is the major language in scholarly
communication.

When IRs were analysed according to host domain, it was
found that university-based institutions are the leading type of
domains. The finding of the present study may supports the vision of
Stephen Harnad that: ‘Universities need to mandate the self-archiving
of all peer-reviewed research output in order to maximise its research
impact for exactly the same reasons as they currently mandate
publishing it.’ (Harnad, 2003). He also argued that OA self-archiving
to be mandated by research funders and institutions so that the
self-archiving of published, peer-reviewed journal articles (Green) can
be fast-forwarded to 100% OA. On the other hand, analyzing the policy
of IRs it became clear that still the policy of content inclusion,
submission, and preservation are not well defined. There is a need to
establish standard policy so that further these IRs can be used for
information exchange worldwide.

Conclusion

Institutional repositories are being recognized as
essential vehicle for scholarship in the digital world. This is evident
based on the continuous growth of IRs around the world. However, this
growth is more prevalent in developed and western countries as more
than fifty percent IRs existed only in four countries (USA, UK, Germany
and Spain). The contribution of all Asian countries is less than USA
alone as it contributed about 400 IRs. Even in Asia, Japan and Taiwan
have more than fifty percent share in the total number of IRs. Out of
total Asian Countries only 25 have created IRs of which only five
touched the figure of two digits. This is a clear indication that the
movement of green road to open access through institutional repository
in Asian region is in the age of infancy. So, it is now time to rethink
the universities or institutes of the Asian countries, particularly
developing countries, to establish such repository to make available
permanently all digital collections of that institution and
simultaneously to overcome the access barriers within the particular
language periphery. At the same time researchers, academicians and
practitioners within institutions need most of all to become convinced
of their value and their immense potential. It may be expected that the
next few years will see growing connections between institutional
repositories as infrastructure and the broader issues that are emerging
about strategies and infrastructure necessary to support the
management, dissemination and preservation of research data (at the
national, disciplinary and institutional levels).